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Steam Controller Drops Touchscreen
An anonymous reader writes "Last year Valve announced a new game controller that was trying to innovate on the designs that have been with us for over a decade now. The biggest changes were replacing analog sticks with circular touchpads and plopping a small touchscreen into the middle of the controller. Valve has now revamped their prototype hardware, and the touchscreen is nowhere to be seen. In its place are stop/play buttons (which appear similar to start/select buttons) and a bigger Steam logo button. They've also moved around the directional and ABXY buttons, reverting to a more traditional layout (picture). They'll be demonstrating the latest prototype next week at GDC."
Costs, of course. Making a competively priced gaming PC (steam machine) compared to consoles is hard but doable, throw in a controller with an expensive touchscreen and it becomes impossible. Valve apparently had second thoughts over impossing that extra cost on OEMs.
This was announced January 15th at Steam Dev Days. It was all over the news.
http://slashdot.org/submission...
It's just that yesterday (or the day before) they actually unveiled some new imagery showing what it looks like.
Making a competively priced gaming PC (steam machine) compared to consoles is hard but doable
Especially given that the Nintendo 64 was a stripped down SGI Indy, and the original Xbox, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One are made with PC parts.
throw in a controller with an expensive touchscreen and it becomes impossible.
What does this say about the Wii U GamePad?
They said their reasoning was that a screen on the controller forced you to split your attention between the TV screen and the controller screen. The screen on the controller would only end up being useful when you weren't playing a game, and the cost wasn't worth it for being used strictly for non-gaming.
So basically cost wasn't the major factor.
What does this say about the Wii U GamePad?
I'd posit that the Wii U sacrificed a significant amount of hardware in their console for the sake of that fancy gamepad. Even with this new console generation's modest hardware barely being able to render at HD resolutions, the Wii U is still a generation behind. That's not necessarily a criticism, mind you... it's a choice that you have to make about the realities of pricing and hardware specs. Nintendo obviously isn't trying to compete in the high-specs console market, and that's fine. They choose to innovate in other ways.
Valve has to make the same choices regarding price and hardware tradeoffs. Keep in mind that it might not only be about price - it could be that the touchscreen wasn't living up to their expectations in terms of performance. As such, why not go with a tried and true (and cheaper) alternative. After all, the big three have kept their analog sticks and D-pads all this time. There's surely a reason for this other than history or momentum.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Not that I don't like the idea of a touch screen on the controller but I have yet to see a game take advantage of it properly. So far implementations of the Wii U touch screen have been a major pain to use and serve no real purpose in a game. Even the best example I can think of from the Mario game requires a person to pause, change what they are looking at, and then let go of the controller to press the touch panel.
Plus, Valve is now using "Ghost Mode".
They now show what you are touching on top of the game while you are touching it.
Details are in the Steam Controller talk during the Steam Dev Days; starting 23:35.
but imagine all the early adopters buying the cheap pcs and formatting them
Why would early adopters need to format a Steam Machine? They can just exit Steam, start GNOME, and run their non-Steam GNU/Linux applications that way.
Not the lower res/graphical fanciness, but the controller. It isn't that much fun to use as a controller because, well, it is fucking huge. It is a tablet. Thing is, if people wanted to play games on a tablet they'd probably do so and on one that could travel around with them.
Also it is pretty expensive. The screen, wireless interface, processor, all that jazz costs quite a bit and pushed up the cost of the Wii U. Part of what made the Wii successful was that it was really cheap compared to the "big 2" consoles. So people got it for kids or got it as an "and a" console along with their favoured of the bigger ones. This time though, the price advantage is not as much. It is still cheaper but not by as much.
So since the gimmick isn't something people are that interested in, and it drives up the price, it really hasn't been a good move. Despite being out a good bit longer than the Xboner and the PS4 it hasn't sold more.
Actually similar issue on the Xboner's side with the Kinect. That is the primary reason is costs more than the PS4, and that cost has been putting a damper on its sales. People just have no fucks to give about the controller gimmick, they wanna play games.
their reasoning was that a screen on the controller forced you to split your attention between the TV screen and the controller screen
Yep... glad to see someone is learning from the Wii U's mistakes.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
No gaming control pad should have a touchscreen. It was absolutely ridiculous on the Wii U and it'd be ridiculous here...especially considering none of the Steam games out already (that I know of) take advantage of such a feature and TBH I find that touchscreens are one of the worst gaming input devices in existence. Actually, touchscreens are the worst modern input devices bar none, excluding point of sale use cases. Tossing the touchscreen is a great choice.
You do realize that the distance between the two screens is less than an inch, right? And that the distance between the top of the top screen and the bottom of the bottom screen is less than six inches?
Now compare that to the perceived distances between your TV and your controller. Or do you hold your controllers with your arms outstretched parallel to the ground?
Yeah but Steam sales mean we PC gamers really don't have to care and with AMD chips going so cheap you can build nice gaming PCs for a little of nothing. My oldest has a hexacore with 8Gb of RAM and a TB HDD and it only cost $350 shipped, add in another $70 for his HD7750 and he can play pretty much any shooter he cares to play. the youngest decided to go for a quad and spend the extra for an HD7790 and everything is smooth even with the bling cranked.
So who cares if you have to get more than 1 copy? Thanks to steam we only have to download it once and then just copy the folder to the other 2 PCs and between Steam sales, Humble Bundles, and FTP games we literally have more new games to play than we have hours in the day and as a nice bonus you have a system that will play console games going back to the Atari 2600, PC games going back to DOS, and of course web, video, hell you can even get your work done on it ;-)
Oh and if you don't want to even spend that much? head over to Craigslist, plenty of Phenom Is and IIs and C2Qs being sold for cheap. Had a friend that wanted to get into PC gaming but money was tight, found him a nice C2Q system with 19 LCD and KM for just $130, he slapped in an HD6770 he found for $35 and is happily flying his WWII airplanes.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.